Talking to teenagers

  Photo by 胡 卓亨 on Unsplash I’m going to say something conversional now, I will get comments and dislikes. People may question whether I know my stuff, but the simple fact is, in my opinion, mindfulness is not an effective enough therapeutic intervention for children and adolescents. The therapeutic benefit of mindfulness is hard to dispute…for adults. It is great for the people that have practised it and managed to maintain it in everyday life, but I see a lot of young people that say it’s hard to get used to and doesn’t work. It doesn’t help that mindfulness has been sold as a ‘treatment’ for anxiety, you’re going to become the non-anxious and chilled person you see on travel adverts. The truth is that you will be able to ‘manage’ your anxiety with this practice. Mindfulness is being in the present moment, paying attention with the senses to the present thing we are experiencing. It is calming and restorative, but it takes practice and feels very opposite t...

Photo by Sorasak on Unsplash Maintaining causes of anxiety Avoidance is a major player in the maintenance of anxiety, avoiding an activity or object (external stimulus) or an image, memory (internal stimulus) will ensure your anxiety remains firmly in place. Avoidance feels good because it gives us a major feeling of relief, you don’t have to tolerate the terrible anxious state. All the time we do this though we are hardwiring our anxiety. A less extreme version of avoidance is to face the anxiety provoking situation, but to employ safety behaviours, these are things we do that allow us to get through the situation (some people would describe it as endure the situation) When people suffer acute paralysing anxiety they describe living as just surviving. If you think about safety behaviours as shields that prevent new learning taking place, for example: ·        Sit on the edge of a group, not really interacting and hoping you won’t be notic...

What were the media influences we relied upon as teenagers to navigate the world of fashion, culture and friendship in the 80's? They were magazines with proper editors who made the final decision on appropriateness and topical content. It was Jeff Banks on the clothes show telling you what was “in fashion” or as they say now 'on point' It was Grange Hill showing you the valuable lessons in friendships, World in Action making you aware of the bigger injustices worldwide and John Craven delivering the news in the kindest child-friendly way on Newsround. Our media influences were funnelled and filtered to ensure the content matched the audience. How did we know Constance Carroll Heather shimmer lipstick was all the rage? j17 told us. How did you know if your friend was in to chat with, the phone was engaged, then you biked yourself round and stayed until just before crossroads finished and biked back.   The point I am trying to make is that living in th...

Anxiety learning lesson 2 When we experience anxiety something physical actually happens in the brain as well as the body. It may be helpful for us to look at what happens in the brain when we experience anxiety or panic. The brain is a complex network of different working parts, and certain parts are responsible for certain functions. When we lived as cavemen thousands and thousands of years ago, we needed the fight or flight response much more than we do today (although it depends what job or past time pursue as to how much you may need to rely on it) This response is what alerts us to threat or danger. It serves to keep us safe and instinctively choose the right course of action in an unsafe situation. The hunter gatherer, in the stone age, needed this response to survive. Now, in this age, we don’t need to use it so much. There is no real life threatening danger in the supermarket or the school playground, like there was running from a charging mammoth a thousand years a...